Borrowing an idea from his 2003 novel, "Cosmopolis," Mr. DeLillo has his central character spend most of the story in a taxi stuck in traffic. The device worked on the printed page, but it makes a film as excruciating as watching your team's middle reliever walk the bases loaded after inheriting a four-run lead. (At one point, someone behind me in the theater hissed, "Why the hell doesn't he just get out and walk?")

In terms of demographic appeal, "Game 6" has an uncommonly narrow strike zone: literary-minded Red Sox fanatics who recall with awful clarity exactly where they were on the night of Oct. 25, 1986. Within those limits, though, it's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.